Red
by viewingtheinfinite
Summary: Red followed them from birth up until their death, always.


_Red_

* * *

Red was the colour of their house, the colour that the banner-men flew on their flags: a roaring lion sigil in the foreground, displaying Lannister pride through and through, all crimson and ruby palettes. It was red that surrounded their birthing, it was red that was prominent across their mother's pale cheeks when they came out together, and even then they were swathed in red bundles. Cersei came out first and headstrong as the eldest, then little Jaime as the youngest with his hand tightly wrapped around her ankle, and it was the colour red that was everywhere at the start of their lives.

The bed-sheets were red when she ripped her maidenhead, and Jaime sent them hurling into the sea over the cliff whilst she watched behind him. Red took their mother away to a supposed land most people believed in, a land that their father said didn't exist once Joanna was gone and dead and ravaged by childbirth after bringing a stumped child into the world; they had always wished that Tyrion had perished instead of their noble mother, it had never seemed fair to them.

The colour of the Kingsguard was white, not red, but the amount of blood spilt in its name would have been more than enough surely to stain their cloaks sopping wet, bright burgundy. Cersei was not to be silenced when she had discovered that her twin brother was to be married to an ugly Tully girl—a Lysa or something like that. Her hands had reached out for his breeches, and they were both worn out by the morning, and Jaime signed up for the Kingsguard as soon as the offer came.

So many more sheets were ruined after her marriage to King Robert—the fat, unworthy one with nineteen-plus bastards or something or other in the line-up in all his years of whoring—three sheets to be exact, though such blood, such _red _doesn't belong to Robert but Cersei and Jaime, their blood combined as it should be. The first boy had blonde curls and emerald eyes, the first girl had blonde curls and emerald eyes, the second boy had blonde curls and emerald eyes; it was truly a miracle no one noticed, that the children were hardly Robert's. Jaime had attended each birth dutifully, held each child tenderly like a lion with a cub, lamented his anger when Robert didn't have the decency to attend his "children's" births, instead hunting boars and getting drunk whilst Cersei did the work.

Jon Arryn coughed red from the poison, and died in their name. There was red from Bran Stark's broken bones when he was pushed from the window, by Jaime of course. There was quite a lot of red when his sword went through Eddard Stark's leg, too, and when he slaughtered his men, and red surrounded Jaime endlessly when he fought aside his father in the name of Tyrion, when he was captured, and so much later when he had his hand brutally amputated.

Joffrey died, and after the Silent Sisters had cleaned away the red, he had been laid out on the pyre peacefully, as though he were asleep. Cersei's skirts were red when they made love for what seemed to be the final time ever until Jaime left her again, this half of him that wasn't so much his half anymore, but another person, and he was his own person, and he thought suddenly that they weren't really one soul in two bodies after all.

It was red that had followed them from birth to death. Jaime's hands had shaken around the hilt of the sword, shook violently when the blade sliced through Cersei's skin with such ease. It pierced her heart and it didn't take her long to die, not with such a method. She slumped against him, his twin sister, and then fell backwards ungracefully against the stone floor. Red all down the steps; Jaime plunged the sword through his own heart, even moved his armour to make the path effortless, and didn't see black when he died, not at first.

No. Himself and Cersei on a throne with crowns on, for they were King and Queen. Joffrey standing proudly at their side, Myrcella and Tommen playing with kittens around them. There was Tyrion and Tywin too, even Joanna, as golden and noble and beautiful as he remembered her. Yet there was something so unnatural about them, that in his last moments of death, it unnerved him.

They were all bathed in red. Thick, crimson blood coating them, and they were all so oblivious to it.

Jaime's hand stretched out with his last breath and grabbed Cersei's heel, then slowly he managed to curl his fingers around her ankle. They died like they had been born.

It was all so red. So _Lannister_.


End file.
